Women’s and Children’s Health

PopPov research projects have investigated the ways in which different types of investments and policies in reproductive health affect the health of women and children in low- and middle-income countries.

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This map is is a visual representation of the countries where the PopPov network of researchers have studied social, health, and economic issues. Each red pin represents a PopPov project and is located in the country of study.

Using the Demographic Household Surveys from 1992 to 2009, this project will address whether family planning program access has reduced fertility outcomes, and thus, if it has induced an increase in women’s economic opportunities as well as an increase in their children’s human capital.

This study investigates the effects of adverse conditions in-utero and in early childhood on children’s physical and cognitive development and explores potential mechanisms through which these adversities affect children. The focus of this study is on violent conflicts that represent a significant shock to the well-being of many households in developing countries, using data from Colombia.

Trade has been posited as a key factor in economic development, and economists have argued that trade leads to higher income growth rates. Many developing countries have adopted increasingly open trade policies with the objective of spurring growth, though there is little evidence of the effect of trade on child health.

This dissertation examines the causes of fertility variations in both Ghana and the U.S. as well as the impacts of family size on children in Ghana. The researcher examines the impact of the number of children in the household on child malnutrition outcomes, and findings suggest that the number of children is negatively correlated with child malnutrition outcomes in the short-term but not in the long run.

This research looks at the long term effects of maternal fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Using data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) Wave 3, the research finds that those potentially exposed work fewer hours and are more likely to be self-employed with disproportionate effects on females and rural borns.

In Indonesia, only 2 USD per person is invested annually in water and sanitation, far less than other low and middle-income countries. Clean water is critical to maintaining proper hygiene during childbirth; therefore, readily available safe water could result in decreased maternal and infant mortality. This study examines the effects of piped water on infant mortality, the long-term effects on health in later life, economic outcomes, and how all these effects differ by gender.

Despite country level programs and international goals which aimed to improve maternal health, indicators of maternal health in Zambia continue to show poor maternal and child health. This study investigates how changes in poverty affect maternal and child health in Zambia, especially when analyzing the effects of equity in the utilization of health services.

Using population‐level data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), researchers examine the impact on child health of a large‐scale conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades. This anti‐poverty program puts additional resources in the hands of women and their families and encourages parents to invest in human capital of their children.

This study explores the impact of Zambia’s child grant programme (CGP), a government operated large-scale unconditional CT programme, which gives monthly transfers, primarily to female adults with children under-5, on a range of maternal health outcomes focusing on quality and quantity of prenatal care and skilled attendance at birth.

Fertility and the number of children in a household can influence the way that a vulnerable household deals with critical risks and shocks. The research aims to identify and document the various roles children play in the household risk-management efforts of poor rural families in West Africa.

The main objective of the project is to assess the extent of unmet needs in reproductive health (RH) of adolescents and youth in Central Africa and to illustrate their links with poverty in its various dimensions (income poverty and non-income poverty) and its levels of manifestation (microindividual, microhousehold, macrocity, and macronational). The study covers nine countries of Central Africa (Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, and Sao Tome) and relies on a complementary analysis of existing sociodemographic data and collection of original data including biographical, qualitative, and situational surveys.

There has been increasing evidence showing that environmental influences early in life impact on human capital later in life. This research examines the relationship between health early in life and later-life outcomes by analyzing the long-term impact of the 1989 village midwifery program in Indonesia on children’s health and cognitive outcomes.

India is home to the largest malnourished child population in the world with around 80 million children. India’s flagship program and the only national program for combating child malnutrition is the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). This research takes advantage of data from the 2005-2006 National Family Health Survey on ICDS to look at the impact of its Supplementary Nutrition Program on children’s growth.

In Malawi, women on average bear about six children. One-quarter to one-third of these children are unwanted or occur sooner than desired and could thus be prevented by greater uptake of effective contraception. The key aim of this research is to assess the impact of unwanted births on family welfare.

This research addresses the larger debate in demography about the causal relationship between contraceptive supply and the demand for smaller families and fertility decline. The study investigates the effect of increased access to legal abortion when Ghana’s criminal code was amended in 1985 on a subsequent fertility decline.

This study investigates the relationship between extreme weather events, climate volatility, and infant survival in Africa, with a focus on socio-economic mediators as well as fertility responses to weather induced infant mortality. The project leverages all existing sub-Saharan African DHS surveys that contain household location coordinates and maps the birth outcomes reported by these households to daily temperature and rainfall estimates valid for a 50×50 kilometer area over the period 1977-2002.

Poverty is commonly cited as a key driver of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, yet little causal evidence shows a link between economic conditions to actual disease outcomes. Using data on more than 200,000 individuals across 19 Sub-Saharan African countries, the study finds that negative income shocks can lead to substantial increases in HIV prevalence, particularly for women in rural areas.

China is one of the first developing countries to implement a large-scale regulation on pollutant emissions from industry. There is a necessity to examine the tradeoffs between the environment, health, and economic growth, and this study quantifies the impacts of air pollution and related regulations on infant mortality in China.

This research extends a longitudinal study in Ecuador that evaluated the impact of intervention programs which improve circumstances surrounding birth, maternal and child health, and parenting “quality” on child cognitive and physiological development. This project focuses on how family size interacts with the use of early childhood development (ECD) interventions and how it mediates the impact of those interventions on child cognitive outcomes.

This research studies the diffusion of a biofortified crop through social networks and the impact on maternal and child health. With the goal of reducing micronutrient deficiencies, biofortification programs encourage farm households to adopt newly bred crop varieties that are denser in the deficient micronutrients.

Developing countries have faced the paradoxical dual burden of malnutrition and obesity. Recent studies have documented the long-term economic effects of maternal and infant malnutrition, however, understanding the intergenerational transmission of health capital is important to understand the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Using household and individual-level longitudinal survey data, the research examines the effects of the famine on the health and education outcomes of children whose parents were born or conceived during the 1959 to 1961 Chinese Famine.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interaction between fertility patterns, reproductive health, and labor force productivity at the household level, using data from Wave-I and Wave II of the Women’s Health Survey, which includes 3,200 women and households in rural Ghana

This project explores the impact of financial crisis on the poor in Indonesia. Data shows in the first year of the crisis, poverty rose by between 50 and 100 percent, real wages declined by around 40 percent, and household per capita consumption fell by 15 percent. The crisis affected the poorest, the middle-income households, and households in the upper part of the income distribution in Indonesia.

This study explores the impact of severe obstetric complications and the costs of treating such complications on economic, social, and physical well-being, and examines whether such events lead to sustained impoverishment in the longer term (three to four years). It builds on a recently longitudinal study (IMMPACT OAP study) of 1,014 women in Burkina Faso, which investigates the health, economic, and social consequences of severe (“near miss”) complications compared with normal facility-based births up to one year postpartum.

Using experimental and non-experimental micro-level data from four different countries, the project measures the effects of investments in family planning and reproductive health services on a broad array of indicators of the health and well-being of women, their children, and their families. The research team assesses the causal effects of programs focused on choices about family planning and reproductive health care, on the health and well-being of women and children and on the status of women pertaining to their economic productivity, savings, and investment choices.

In many Asian, Arab, and African countries, most rural women live with their mother-in-law during early-married life, and during years when women make vital fertility and human capital decisions, they are under the supervision of the mother-in-law. The study explores the effects of this intergenerational-within-gender power dynamic on the welfare of women and children of India and Bangladesh and finds that the health consequences of coresidence during pregnancy results in the mother-in-law being a valuable resource during this period.

Since the early 1990s, several states in India have introduced financial incentive programs to discourage son preference among parents and to encourage investment in daughters’ education and health. This study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana, Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughter, Our Wealth).

There is not enough rigorous empirical evidence to support claims that access to reproductive health services and technologies impact the economic lives of women and children, or that decisions about contraceptive use and fertility respond to improvements in economic opportunities. This study focuses on the effects of contraceptive availability on economic outcomes, male involvement and bargaining effects, and peer effects on adoption, with the goal to impact policy by providing evidence on whether and how to promote access to and use of modern contraceptives, especially in Africa where male involvement in family planning is actively debated.

In early 1994, more than 500,000 refugees fled the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda into Kagera, a region in northwestern Tanzania. Previous research has focused on displaced individuals, whereas this study examines the effect of forced displacements on the host communities.